Chris Concannon: Sure. First, obviously, we continue to grow share, as I mentioned, across a number of our key products in the face of competition and high grade in particular, we are generally impacted by a lower volatility, particularly around the ETF market, given how important we are to the ETF market makers and some of the systematic hedge funds that trade that ETF arb. So we typically are more impacted than any competitors in that market. With regard to high grade portfolio trading, while we did grow our portfolio trading in high grade somewhere around 13% year-over-year, it’s really not as fast as the market has been growing. So the competitive impact in high grade is largely around the growth of portfolio trading in high grade.
We do feel very comfortable about the launch of our enhanced portfolio trading platform and our embedded unique data attributes, and that’s what clients are asking us for. We’ve been out talking to clients that are portfolio traders and, obviously, as Rich mentioned, it’s a very concentrated dealer market in the portfolio space, but it’s certainly also concentrated among the number of traders that trade portfolio trades at the various client desks. I will tell you we are protocol agnostic, while we obviously have different rates for different protocols. We are delivering protocols that our clients are asking for and we’re delivering unique data to help them decide the appropriate protocol at the appropriate time. I do think the other patterns that we have recognized that is lower vol, we do see higher levels of portfolio trading in the market, because it’s just easier to price a portfolio when the market isn’t moving or gyrating.
So we’ve also identified that in the second quarter, given the lower volatility.
Richard Schiffman: Maybe it’s about automation, what that is going to do here, one thing we learned in the earliest days of the company that when we make things easier, people trade more. So all of this investment that we’re making in automation and Adaptive Auto-X and all these capabilities, one nice benefit from all this is the potential for increases in turnover and seeing more activity that way. So we believe as this starts to take hold, we’re going to see the benefits come from that more activity taking place, because it’s just easier for people to trade.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Patrick O’Shaughnessy with Raymond James. Please go ahead.
Patrick O’Shaughnessy: Hey, good morning. For clients who access your platform via the leading order management systems, to what extent do they have access to your entire suite of protocols, data solutions, workflow solutions, and algorithms?
Chris Concannon: So, yeah, there’s a number of leading sizable order management systems across the globe that we interact with. We certainly work closely with our partners at those order management systems to ensure that our various protocols, our various APIs and our data is available. And we’ve certainly worked closely with some of the largest. The nice thing about our design is when the OMS connects to us; they can move orders into our environment. And then within our environment, clients can move those orders across various different protocols, so they become available instantly in our environment to move them from protocol to protocol. As we mentioned, the new platform that we’ve launched allows clients to load those orders directly from the OMS.
And we’re integrated to really all of the OMS that are material in our market. And once they’ve load those orders onto our platform, they can manage them as high-touch, low-touch, and no-touch, which is really delivering them into our automation suite. So it allows a client to really have a centralized cockpit to decide how to trade their various order sizes, and then from that cockpit, they can deliver those orders into each of our protocols. All those protocols are instantly available. But more importantly, we embed that data that I spoke about earlier, that proprietary data side-by-side with their orders, so they can make logical decisions based on data that they’ve never seen before, on what protocol, what dealers, and what automation solutions are available to them.
